Cast a wide net and you’d best be wary of what you bring into the boat. A week before his outreach at a Jewish retreat, George Allen made the rounds of three Tea Party rallies, hedging bets. The craftiest moves his handlers can conjure for their defective “leader?”
Possibly they assume that Virginia Republicans will fall in line behind his candidacy for the Senate in 2012. In preparation, they are laying the groundwork for redemption from his “macaca” moment in 2006. And, somehow they want to get by his dismissal of his heritage by claiming that his mother made a “really great ham sandwich.” But they discover once and again that Allen is intellectually limited. He is a caricature of their ideal candidate; a nanophilosopher of the conservative movement.
On his tale of the revelation of his Jewish heritage: the breakfast story simply isn’t credible. If he is such a history buff, how is it that he was never inquisitive enough about his own ancestry that he hadn’t run these facts to ground as a routine matter of intellectual curiosity? Neatly packaged, though, until he wanders off script. Allen’s contradictory tales are irreconcilable.
Here he is again pandering to constituencies outside his comfort zone by trying to align them to his own:
“The civil and women’s rights movements focused on access to freedom and basic rights…the tea-party movement is an exercise of those rights. The tea parties benefit from women’s rights and civil rights.” – George Allen
Every morning white men everywhere in America wake up and thank the heavens that the civil and women’s rights movements gave them the equality they enjoy today. Allen seems concerned that all people identify with him. He prefers no challenge. Aw shucks.
“While Allen aligns himself with the tea party movement, the question is whether that will still resonate in 2012… Two years down the line, the tea party may not help him that much.” – Bob Roberts, JMU political scientist
There is doubt that the Tea Party phenomenon will have legs into 2012. Even if it does, the “fiscal success” of a potentially Republican controlled Congress is not guaranteed and that may send the movement into frustrated remission, or worse for the GOP, to a Ross Perot style independent candidacy. Can you say Palin-Allen? An almost certain Obama re-election formula.
Or maybe Allen doesn’t want to run for anything at all. Maybe he simply wants to repair his reputation, collect a bundle of cash, and settle in as an influential senior statesman. Doesn’t seem he’s that smart, though.
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